New Delhi: Voting began on Thursday for the UK’s general election, being largely seen as a close fight between the incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer.
The polls hold significance as it may end the 14-year rule of the Conservatives in the UK, as per several pre-poll surveys.
The polls will close at 10 pm following which the exit polls will be out, indicating what the final result may look like. A first-past-the-post electoral system is followed in the UK, where voters elect representatives in 650 constituencies. The party that wins the majority, at least 326 seats, gets to form the government. Its leader becomes the Prime Minister. However, if no party gets the majority then the existing PM gets the chance to form a coalition government.
The main political parties in the poll fray are the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, Liberal Democrats led by Ed Davey, Reform UK led by Nigel Farage, Scottish National Party (SNP) led by John Swinney, and the Green Party co-led by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay.
Opinion polls predict landslide victory for Labour Party
According to news agency Reuters, majority of the opinion polls have put Starmer’s centre-left party on course for a landslide victory. The pre-poll surveys claim that the voters may turn their backs on the Conservatives, whose recent tenures have been marked by infighting and turmoil. In the past eight years, the Conservatives had five Prime Ministers.
A forecast by polling company Survation claimed that the Labour Party would win 484 of the 650 seats in the British Parliament. If these figures stand true, then it will be Labour Party’s historic win breaking the previous record of its leader Tony Blair who came to power with 418 seats in 1997.
An early election and the possible reason
The last general election in the UK was held in December 2019. But, Prime Minister Sunak took everyone by surprise when he announced a snap election on July 4. According to a news report in Aljazeera, John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, claims that the ‘mystery’ behind an early election was unknown to anyone outside Sunak’s inner circle. However, speculations were rife that the Conservative Party may have realised that the economic predictions for the country would n’t improve before the year’s end. It is also being speculated that the party may have not been convinced about the possibility of stemming asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel that separates southern England from northern France. Earlier, the party had made promises to curb irregular migration. crossing the English Channel that separates southern England from northern France.
Key issues
According to the survey published by polling company YouGov, about 52 per cent of the voters cited that the economic issues with high cost of living were one of the key issues of the poll, followed by health and immigration issues. As per the survey conducted by Ipsos, a multinational market research and consulting firm, the top five issues respondents identified are: healthcare and the National Health Service (NHS) (41 per cent), the economy (33 per cent), immigration (30 per cent), inflation (29 per cent) and housing (17 per cent).